


there's a white flag waiting (just to find out what we're made of)

by simplyprologue



Series: who said this must be all or nothing? [2]
Category: Professional Wrestling, World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Angst, Dean Does Some Light Stalking, Everyone Needs to Go to Therapy, Future Fic, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mutual Idiocy, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sleep Paralysis, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-09
Updated: 2018-11-09
Packaged: 2019-08-20 22:32:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16564367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: There’s the pain that happens to you, and the pain you choose. Seth Rollins knows all about the pain you choose, the pain you think you can control. And if Dean has chosen this, chosen to walk down this path, what can Seth do but choose to walk it with him?Or: Seth is just trying to get some sleep, but he can't get Dean out of his head. Or apparently, his house.





	there's a white flag waiting (just to find out what we're made of)

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** This fic is roughly 85% projection of all my issues onto Seth Rollins and 100% the result of me being really, really sad on Monday night. Don't do drugs, kids. Go to therapy instead of deciding to start a blood feud with your soulmate because you know he'll take it. Author endorses maybe 10% of the behavior in this fic. Author would like to apologize for ripping off Buffy and The Haunting of Hill House. Title is a line from the song "Carry" by Branches. 
> 
> Set in the not-so-distant future of like. Maybe January? Before the next Rumble. This is technically the second fic in a series, but you don't need to have read the first one to Get It. 
> 
> Many thanks to my red team, Leah, who helped me kick this fic down the path until it was done. If you'd like some music to vibe with while reading this messy gay angst, I made a playlist on Spotify which you can listen to [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/eadama/playlist/1yO8MW2aLeDgAbaiIt40tr?si=tBMa5aqSQI-JjWbCwiOqEw).

He stops thinking in verbs. _Car. Plane. Iowa._ They bleed out of his life week after week, until he can feel his heart slow and stutter and stop, even in the ring. _Superplex. Falcon Arrow. Stomp._ Everything in his life becomes a noun, static and stagnant. _Intercontinental Championship. Title Match. Former Champion._ He’s not sure when he lost all his verbs, it wasn’t right away that he lost his something to believe in, the something that electrified his bones and made him feel alive.

The first few weeks he was still grieving, he was still fighting.

(Seth Rollins, former—

 _Champion. Shield Brother. Partner._ )

Dean still hasn’t given him any reasons, Dean barely speaks to him at all. Dean changes the rules constantly, without warning and without notice, to keep everyone but most of all Seth from guessing what’s going on in his head at any given moment. But Seth can guess enough — that Dean’s forgiveness was always a contingency, a bandage to ease another wound. And now, facing down another howling loss, Dean has ripped off the bandage and torn open all his old wounds. Found comfort in the pain, in the familiar agony of the justified target. Dean’s not like him. He’s not calculating, he’s not a planner. Dean barely knows what move he’s going to do in the ring until right before he does it. This, Seth knows, happened because Dean felt like it was the right thing to do. For his own survival. Dean faced down immense pain and suffering and programmed into him was one thing: destroy Seth Rollins.

Seth knows one thing now, more than anything else: he broke Dean Ambrose.

Two things, if he’s being honest.

He broke Dean Ambrose. It will never be fixed.

Three things. In all honesty, it’s three things. There’s the pain that happens to you, and the pain you choose. Seth Rollins knows all about the pain you choose, the pain you think you can control. And if Dean has chosen this, chosen to walk down this path, what can Seth do but choose to walk it with him?

Here is a fact of the universe: Dean Ambrose will always come for Seth Rollins, as assuredly as Seth Rollins will always come for Dean Ambrose.

And it might just be killing him.

_Car. Plane. Home._

(But home is gone now. Home was the arms of two brothers, the loyalty and the glory. Home was something else he burned down.

He can never go home again. He killed it. He made sure it.

Now he knows it.)

He’s not as strong as Dean. He hasn’t survived the kind of childhood Dean had. He hasn’t come back from death’s door. He hasn’t survived the betrayal of one of the people he loves the most.

He’s not sure if he will.

The flight to Iowa from RAW was five and a half hours, and he doesn’t remember any of it. He picks up his car from the long term lot, slides the key into the ignition, and feels nothing. Foot easing onto the gas pedal, he glides the vehicle onto the highway, and drives home because that’s where he’s supposed to go. This weekend is a string of events in the rust belt before RAW again, somewhere along the Mississippi. Then back home again, on a shorter flight, making the same drive. And multiple times in between all those cars and planes and shuttles, Dean will leave him on his back in the ring, blinking blearily up at the halo of arena lights, praying for answers from an angry god. And it will continue. Week, after week, after week.

Just as it has the past — Seth does the unforgiving arithmetic.

Close to three months now.

_You really wanna know why I did it?_

Streetlights whir by in hazy trails of yellow, one hand loosely holding the steering wheel at six o’clock, the other resting on the center console, fingers tapping a restless staccato. Dean may not be calculating, but he knows how to win a battle, how to find a single minded brutal strategy for war and hold onto it with bloody fingernails. In more than one way, Seth made it easy for him. No one knows him better than Dean, no one knows better than Dean than Seth’s molecular make-up demands that things be made sense of, categorized and neatly explained.

There will be no explanations.

_Car. Luggage. Keys._

Now what? His house is the way he left it, and he leaves his suitcases by the door. No use in unpacking when he’s leaving in two days. No use in unpacking…

There’s a buzzing in his head, which if he allowed it to come to full volume, would be Dean’s voice. He runs the buzzing over with a freight train of nouns. There are times when it’s easier. When he can put headphones on or a CD in a car, turn up the volume past the level good sense dictates as safe. When he’s in a crowd of screaming thousands, when his blood is pounding in his ears. But when it’s quiet, when the work is done, there’s still the buzzing in his head.

 _I’m sorry, did you say brother? Brother? I ain’t your brother,_ Seth can hear, if he stands still.

So he doesn’t.

But he is so, so tired.

 _Pajamas. Face wash. Beer._ He stands in his kitchen. There are some frozen meals stacked neatly inside his freezer, if he was hungry. Takes another swig of beer, holds it in his mouth for a moment too long, then swallows. _Eggs. Bacon. Avocado._ That could be a meal. _Beer. Beer. Beer._

He just wants it to stop.

For a minute. Seven hours really, if he could just get seven hours — nothing would be fixed, nothing would be alright, but things would on a slightly more even keel.

 _Alprazolam. Lorazepam._ _Carisoprodol. Zolpidem tartrate. Gabapentin._

When he first got injured he had prescription after prescription thrown at him — painkillers, muscle relaxants, sleep aids, sedatives, an antidepressant. Some he took, some he didn’t. Some he got refills for, and then weaned himself off of, even as the online pharmacy sent a bottle with 30 more pills the first Tuesday of every month. They’re years old, by this point, and Seth doesn’t know how effective.

Pulling out little orange bottles, brittle plastic and bubbled sticker labels, child safe caps — makes his heart pound. He lines them up in a little row on his kitchen counter, hunting them down in two different bathrooms, his nightstand, his dresser. Some of the prescriptions are still active. Seth bends at the waist, eyeing bottle after bottle, reading the labels. Expiration dates. The time he has to be on the road on Thursday to make it to the house show. Half lives and the placebo effect and the odds of WWE coming to call for the monthly wellness check in the next week, if he cared at all if they did, what it would feel like sitting in the office as they read the test results. The implications of that.

The not caring.

He didn’t do this, as a teenager. Or ever, at all. He barely took them when he was injured, afraid of screwing himself out of his career.

 _Alprazolam._ _Carisoprodol. Zolpidem tartrate._

It’s the last thing he has to lose.

Seth Rollins takes a calculated risk in a tidy little handful.

 

* * *

 

Thirty minutes later, he thinks he may have calculated wrong. It might have been the second Xanax or the old as fuck Ambiens he swallowed two of or the fact he settled on a fourth beer, but Seth staggers to his feet off the couch, head swimming.

_Water. Ibuprofen. Bed._

He makes it to water, plucking a clean glass out of the drying rack and running it under the tap, not bothering to turn it off until the first gulp of water passes his lips.

As he drinks, the floor slips out from under him, the room spinning. His stomach flips, churning acid back up his throat, chased back down by more water. Squeezing his eyes shut, he leans against the counter, and lowers himself to the floor.

_Mistake. Mistake. Mistake._

For the briefest of moments, his body offers him the opportunity to vomit. Then exhaustion crashes over him, pulls him down all the way to the cool tile of his kitchen floor. He feels nothing, a crushing, dark, beautiful sensation of nothing, a wave of drowning peace, the dulled nerves on his cheek against cold. His eyes flutter closed.

The buzzing stops.

 

* * *

 

 

It didn’t start immediately after joining the Authority - that was its own high, one that kept him safe for over a year. He didn’t have to think about what he had done, then, not with Kane and J and J and Stephanie and Hunter all taking their turns to whisper poison in his ear, set up his cinder blocks for him, hand him the tools of destruction. It wasn’t immediate.

It was after his knee.

After the surgery. After rehab. Back when he was just waiting, and grinding, and waiting, alone in this house. Wondering if his career would be waiting for him, wondering what there would be for him if he returned.

It wasn’t the Shield, he thought, and adjusted his hopes, his dreams.

After the fifth or sixth time it happened, he saw a doctor.

Sleep paralysis. A condition when, upon falling asleep or waking up, the sufferer finds themselves aware but unable to move or speak. Five percent of the population may have regular episodes. May be brought on by sleep deprivation, psychological stress, physical fatigue, and abnormal sleep cycles. During such an episode, the sufferer may experience hallucinations as the body races to catch up with the mind which has been unceremoniously jerked out of a dysfunctional attempt at REM sleep.

For Seth, it’s always happened as he wakes up.

And the hallucination has always been Dean.

Usually looming as a shadow in his bedroom doorway, or a blur in his periphery, a figure just out of sight only recognizable because he would recognize the shape of Dean anywhere. Back then, between his allegiance to the Authority and the looming crush of loneliness and a burgeoning appetite for redemption, it was cause for panic. That the debt racked up by his sins would finally be repaid in full. That the hole he had torn in Dean’s soul would be filled with his life. But Dean, a hallucination constructed by his lonely, desperate mind, never did anything but watch him silently, out of reach. A threat, that any thoughts of redemption, of rebuilding, would always be followed by justice for all the trespasses that Seth had done against him.

Two weeks after Dean left him concussed next to the ring the episodes began again.

This time around, the hallucination’s silence has felt more like a taunt than a threat.

A question left unanswered.

 _Look,_ the shadow doesn’t say. _Look what I can do to you, too. I’m the lunatic?_  

 

* * *

 

In the darkness, still floating, he thinks he hears the sound of shattering glass.

Step one: reappraisal of the meaning of the attack. Footsteps approach, but from the kitchen floor Seth can’t get his eyes open yet. _Floor. Mistake. Pills._ His body is a heavy weight, immobile and twisted like a crooked branch. He knows he’s awake, he reminds himself that he’s awake, that his brain and body haven’t synced yet, this isn’t the first time - this week, even - that he’s had this hallucination during a sleep paralysis episode. Heavy boots carry someone towards him, and Seth knows if he could just open his eyes, he would see the wavering darkness of Dean’s silhouette in the wide doorway where his kitchen met the living room.

 _Don’t panic,_ he thinks.

“Wake up.”

The buzzing returns, louder and clearer.

“Wake up.”

 _I know,_ Seth thinks. _I have to wake up._ He tries to twitch his hand, his feet, anything, get his eyes to just open.

“Come on, wake the fuck up you piece of shit—”

Step two: create psychological and emotional distance from the hallucination. Catastrophizing the episode will prolong it. Feeling his brows twitch, almost meet, Seth imagines every muscle in his body releasing and melting onto the floor. _Floor. Mistake. Pills. You’re awake. You’re fine. It’s not real._

“Seth, what did you take?”

He can hear the clatter of bottles on his kitchen counter, as if they were being swept to the side, then picked up one by one.

“Wake up. Wake up. Please, just wake up. Jesus Christ. Fucking Christ,” the not-Dean mutters, as if distracted.

Step three: focus attention inward on an emotionally salient positive object, as if Dean hasn’t always been _emotionally salient_ even if the odds on him being a _positive object_ have been slim to none these past four years, barring the months of glory days that autumn winds blew in last years, before winter took it’s hold, and swept him away, out, beyond his reach. Seth wonders, if he ever said it.

Did he say it?

“What did you take, shit head. Wake up. No, you’re not allowed to do this. You’re not allowed to - you can’t.”

Did he ever tell Dean those months were the best of his life?

“Wake up, Seth.”

What would be different, if he had?

“You can’t leave me too.” The hallucination drops down to his knees, still not touching him - because it can’t, it won’t, Seth reminds himself, you know this - but closer, his brain placing it inches from his ear before moving away again. “What did you take - how much - do I need to call 911? Seth? Seth what the _fuck._ ”

It’s too much - gritting his teeth, voice gurgling in his throat, Seth forces his fingers to curl into a fist and then relax, curl, and then relax. Some terrible half-yell escaping him, he fights to roll onto his side, fights his eyes to open, pushing himself into the semblance of a seated position. Dean, pale and sweaty and dressed in the same clothes he was the last time Seth saw him, is braced against the counter, eyes wide and bewildered.

“You’re not really here,” Seth tells himself, tongue and lips blunt and numb. He drags himself across the floor. _Bed. Bed. Bed._ “You’re not here. This is just another episode. I’m awake, and it’s going to be over soon.”

“What the fuck did you take?”

He ignores Dean. It’s not real. “I’m going to bed, I’m going to go back to sleep, in the morning this will be over.”

None of it will be _over._

But he’ll have a day or two to try to reorient himself, reset to the time where he and Dean lived only to destroy each other. Burn together, perish alone. He can’t _do that_ with Dean’s voice in his head. Seth rolls over, onto his knees, and pulls himself to his feet. When he turns around, Dean will be gone.

He turns.

Dean is still there.

“Fuck me,” Seth mutters.

He wonders if he asked now, if he would get any answers, if Dean could explain the calculus of betrayal, if it comes down to time or if it comes down to pain, how to quantify the qualitative measure of devastation and months spent out for injury added or subtracted to the variables, or multiplied it, anguish and fear and anger growing exponentially as activity decreased to an asymptote at near-zero.

If he will never be truly forgiven, then at least when will it stop?

The sprawling ranch on nine acres of Iowa farmland has four bedrooms, his in the very back, but he knows he just needs to make it to one of them. Dean is silent, and Seth begins to inch towards the hallway that will lead him out of the main area of the house and back to the bedrooms—

When he finds himself pinned to the wall, Dean’s forearm bracing across his chest.

A hallucination has never touched him, at least not so aggressively.

Seth blinks.

“You broke into my house?” he waits for the surge of adrenaline, for any kind of well-honed combat instinct to kick in. But his body is still lethargic and weighty, his feet uncooperative cinder blocks cemented to the carpet. “You couldn’t wait _two days_ to attack me? Where in the unspoken, unwritten rules of Ambrose — did they change? They’ve been changing a lot recently, and I’m doing my best to play by them.”

Dean’s face collapses from rage, to grief, to devastation before pushing back and away, retreating back towards the kitchen.

“Why are you — were you stalking me?”

Seth may never sleep again; Dean remains silent, pacing between the refrigerator and the stove, hand over his mouth.

Here is a fact of the universe — one that is a promise, a death knell, a soft-spoken declaration of love and a howl of pain. Here is a fact of the universe: Dean Ambrose will always come for Seth Rollins, as assuredly as Seth Rollins will always come for Dean Ambrose.

“Why did you come here? Dean!” Seth snaps, thoughts racing in a circle like a goldfish in a bowl, getting lost in the tight confines and drowning at the bottom. Temples throbbing, he smacks his hand against the door jam — Dean has no right. Dean has no right. Dean hasn’t been to his house in — ever, really, he has no right. Dean can ambush him when he’s down, drive his face into the canvas, the mat, the concrete. But here, Dean has no right. “I’m going to bed. Don’t be here when I get up.”

There is nothing he wants more, than to wake up with Dean breathing low and slow and deep next to him. To be able to wake up and watch his chest rise and fall. To wake up and watch his face slackened, at peace.

Seth knows he has no right.

Not anymore.

If he had known it was the last time, would he have stayed longer?

Seth stares at Dean, really stares, with his mouth as dry as cotton and his temples throbbing, white spots pushing into the corners of his vision. Then he braces his hand against the wall, makes his retreat on his own territory.

“Wait,” Dean says, then claps his hand over his mouth again.

“What?” Seth bites out.

Nothing.

_“What?”_

“What the _fuck_ just happened?” Dean asks, Dean explodes, Dean recoils again, almost immediately, into the dark corners of his poorly-lit kitchen, hiding in trapped shadows.

Seth squints.

“Are you — are you scared?”

“No,” Dean scoffs.

“Right. Of course you’re not,” he says, trying to shake his head. It hurts, and he regrets everything that’s happened in the past six years of his life at once. Six, eight, maybe ten, all the way back to the first phone call from the WWE about their developmental territory. Spool it all back up, to when things were simpler and his dreams were still a big wide horizon, before he had done and lost it all, loved and sold out and cashed in and learned what it meant to break something and not be able to put it back together. “I’m going to bed. I don’t know what you broke to get in here, but clean it up. See you on Thursday. I’ll be the one you’re trying to kill. Burn it Down shirt, tight pants, talking like an idiot on the mic. Can’t miss me.”

This time, he makes it halfway down the hallway to his bedroom before he hears Dean’s voice, quiet and gruff enough that Seth wonders if Dean hoped he could say the words without Seth actually hearing him at all.

“I looked in the kitchen window and saw you on the floor. And all the pill bottles and I thought you—”

He turns around and Dean is there, out of the kitchen. In the hallway. Walking towards him.

Seth is so, so tired.

_Hallway. Door. Bed._

No human is meant to take so much Xanax and Ambien and then _be awake._

“You’re not that important, Ambrose.”

Dean ignores him, venturing closer. “You were on the floor. And then you were making — what were those sounds? And you were acting like I wasn’t — what did you take?”

“Clearly, not enough.”

“You’re gonna get suspended.” He looks him up and down, eyes narrowed. At his side, his hands form into fists, then release again. Seth knows the look on his face - Dean’s aching to touch him, but Seth doesn’t know if it’s to hurt, or to comfort.

To hurt himself, or to hurt Seth.

To comfort himself, or to comfort Seth.

“At last,” Seth deadpans, “some decent fucking rest, since I don’t have any titles to defend anymore or teammates to run with.”

“This isn’t you.”

There’s a heady mix of emotion on Dean’s face, rage and fear and what Seth thinks might be shame.

“Don’t act like you care,” Seth snarls. His body propels forward until he and Dean are chest to chest, Dean in a black tank and that stupid new camo jacket, his stupid new grey jeans, his stupid ubiquitous heavy boots and Seth is acutely aware of himself in thin drawstring sweatpants, a worn tee shirt, his bare feet, the bruise on the side of his face from last night’s RAW. A study in contrasts, as they’ve always been.

They stand, breathing, half in the shadows, half burned — by life, by their chosen career, by each other. A chiaroscuro of sin and sinned-against, an ever-turning wheel of betrayal and forgiveness, pain and healing.

The dark and the light, phasing through each other, eclipsing but only for brief moments.

And then the moment is gone.

“Get. Out. Of. My. House,” Seth says, voicing lowering with each descendant word. “If I step on glass in the morning I am grinding it and bagging it up, bringing it to the arena, and putting it in your Lucky Charms.”

He takes a step backwards, intending to swing around, but somewhere in the simple motion he loses his balance and catches himself on a slender table that, in theory, is for knick-knacks but in practice is a graveyard of receipts and travel itineraries.

Groaning, he presses the heel of his hand to his forehead.

He knew there was a reason he didn’t do this.

Drugs.

“Need help?” Dean asks, tone flat.

“Do I need help? Do _I_ need help?” Seth balks, the hallways elongating and shortening as his head is clearly convinced that he’s riding on a tilt-a-whirl or viking ship, some kind of carnival ride that glides clearly through a loophole in safety regulations. “He asks if I need help.” He could vomit, right here, on the floor. He fights it down. “Dean why are you _here?”_

Dean’s lip curls, features contorting with rage.

“Why did you take the pills?”

 _Because only you’re allowed to fuck up your life?_ Seth thinks. _Or because only you are allowed to fuck up mine?_

_My life relies upon the spoils of your mercy?_

“To get you out of my head for twelve hours, but it turns out you’re here, and I’ve got nine acres that are as good a place as any to hide a body,” He manages, somehow, to let go of the table and gesture wildly in Dean’s direction. It’s a miracle his feet are still under him. “And why is that, Ambrose? Why are you here?”

“I was—”

But Dean stops talking, choking his words off.

“Are you capable of giving straight answers? Ever? To any question asked of you?”

(Because Seth doesn’t know if he _wants_ answers. If clarity will be better or worse than this maddening silence, than Dean’s refusal to explain anything.

If answers will rearrange the facts of the universe as he knows them, he doesn’t want answers.)

“I just don’t know what—”

Dean does it again, scrubbing a hand over his beard.

“No. Just. Why are you here?” Seth asks.

Let it be for harm. Let it be for love. He doesn’t fucking _care_ anymore.

“I was worried about you,” Dean bites out, staring down at his feet.

“That’s a phone call — but you don’t do those anymore, right. Worried. That’s not a good enough reason to be in my kitchen, in _Iowa_ , at one in the morning.” Or whatever time it is. He doesn’t know, and his body thrums with how much he just doesn’t care. He could burn for how much he no longer cares.

Seth doesn’t know how, but their faces are inches apart again. “And worried? Really, worried? When you left me with a cracked skull lying on the concrete? When you let the AOP beat the tar out of me before coming into finish the job yourself? When you watched me lose the Intercontinental Title and — yet again, put my face in the mat? Cut the bullshit.”

Mouth opening, and closing, then opening again, Dean’s expression eventually settles on one of open anguish.

“Don’t look at me like that.” Seth spits the words at both of their feet. “You don’t get to look at me like that now.”

“I’m gonna go,” Dean murmurs, nostrils flaring.

He doesn’t make a single move.

“No you’re not,” Seth says, forcing the words off his tongue. “If you leave now you’ll wrap your car around a tree and I’m gonna have to deal with it because I’m still listed as your emergency contact.”

A complete silence blooms between them, dark and painful as a bruise. The house creaks, the pipes burble. The wind, until now otherwise still, speaks to fill the quiet. _I care,_ Seth wants to say. _I care so much it’s feels like it’s going to kill me. I care so much it drives me insane. Is this how you felt? Is this how you want me to feel, too? Is this how we make it end? Does this even have an end?_

He knows this much: he doesn’t want it to end.

Dean swallows hard, turning his face a fraction. It lessens the gravitational pull in their orbit. “I saw you through your kitchen window and I just — and I didn’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. Anymore. Not since—”

_Tricep tear. Near death experience. Roman’s announcement._

“So you take it out on me?”

“You take it.” Dean swipes his hand across his mouth, wiping away the evidence of confession.

In the end, when all is sorted out, truth is a precious commodity between them. Why concede to what they can’t fight, when they can fight each other instead?

“Yeah.” Seth nods. Hands on his hips, he backs away again. Turns his back on Dean, again. “Yeah, I do,” he rasps, throat clogging and eyes burning. “Because I’m a fucking chump. You’ve made sure I’ve lost everything, just like I made sure you—”

He stumbles, Dean catches him, and Seth wants to burn all nine acres to the ground because he is in his house with Dean, and Dean has touched him in it. Is there nothing in his life without Dean Ambrose’s indelible fingerprints, does he have to take up every space and corner?

 _Burn it down,_ he thinks. _Burn it down burn it down burn it down burn—_

“Do you — can you walk?”

“I’ll manage.” They can’t carry each other out of this. “Don’t sleep on the couch. Take one of the guest rooms.”

“I’m fine on the on—” He starts to protest.

“I don’t wanna wake up and make you move in the morning because you’re gonna be awake until four and sleep until ten and I’ll get up at eight at the latest.”

He can’t see Dean like that. Vulnerable, at peace — as at peace as Dean can ever be. If he watches the slow rise and fall of his chest, he’ll want to sit on the edge of his couch, rest his hand on the dip of Dean’s sternum, feel the pulse of his heart against his palm.

That is not who they can be, now.

“I can go.”

“No.” Seth shakes his head, staggering into his bedroom.

“You sure you’re alright?”

Don’t look back.

“No, I’m not alright, Dean,” Seth answers, dropping down onto the mattress. Does he turn on the lamp on his bedside table? Does he make space for Dean to sit? A sigh expels itself from his body, unwanted, and Seth cards his fingers through his hair, staring straight ahead into the mirror hanging over his dresser. “You make me crazy, you really do. Is that what you wanted?”

See button, push button.

“I’m not the fucking _Architect_ , I don’t always have some grand plan,” Dean snaps, once again the shadow taunting him from the doorway. Seth almost grins, but any satisfaction he feels is tempered by all the medication he threw down his throat earlier in the night. “I _don’t_ have some great plan I’m chasing here I’m just — because I’m not like _you_ and I don’t give a _shit_ about the titles and the glory and the fans and needing everyone to _love me_ — and I’m just — God!”

Dean beats his fist against the molding.

“It’s okay,” Seth says plainly, looking at Dean’s reflection in the mirror, wondering if Dean hesitates because he won’t come in his bedroom.

“Christ,” he mutters. “It’s not okay! This is why we’re—”  

Seth stands. “I’m going to bed now. We can talk in the morning.”

Crossing the room, he brings them face to face for a third time in so few minutes. Then, his hand finds the doorknob.

Close the door, shut him out.

For tonight.

Dean’s hand catches the door, his mouth roiling from a frown, to a disgusted grimace, to a visage of rage — then sadness. It was for this that Seth felt the most sorry for him.

“We’re not gonna talk. We’re not friends, Rollins. Not after everything we’ve done to each other,” Dean says, voice a weak croak swelling to an angry swarm of words. “We’ll fight together and against each other, we’ll cry and we’ll hug and die for each other and destroy each other, but we’re not friends. We’ll never be friends.”

Seth remembers verbs, he remembers their bodies colliding in high-impact hugs, their lips landing on each other’s faces to kiss, their arms lifting title belts high in celebration. He remembers driving, the long car rides with Dean’s feet up on the dashboard as villages and towns passed in long blurs. He remembers the elation and hatred that carried him by turns, he remembers crushing Dean under his heel, he remembers leaving him weeping openly in the ring.

They have been bound by blood and they have been enemies.

“That’s really what you believe?” Seth asks. Dean provides no answer. “You don’t know what you believe.” Dean’s expression shudders. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

“I’ll be gone in the morning,” Dean says, eyes hemmed with tears. Rocking his weight between his feet, he looks as though he wants to run, but doesn’t.

Seth sighs, exhausted or calm. “No you won’t be.”

“How do ya know I won’t bash your brains in while you sleep? Take a sledge to that knee?”

Dean lets go of the door, sweeping his hand over Seth’s body. Steps back until he’s the width of the hallway apart from him.

“For the same reason you broke my goddamn window to get in here because you thought I overdosed,” Seth says, surrendering to naming what happened here tonight. It’s too late, his mouth feels too much like sandpaper, his eyes are as dry as the desert, his head is splitting.  “Same reason you’ve — and I’m just spitballing here — been checking up on me on our days off the past few weeks. Take a guest room. Don’t sleep with your shoes on, my housekeeper isn’t coming for another week.”

“I’m not an animal.”

No, just someone who assumes he’ll have to wake up from a dead sleep and be immediately on the run, from years of waking up just like that.

“I shared hotel rooms with you for literal years, Dean,” is what he says out loud.

“What do you need?”

A glass of water or several, an ibuprofen or several. A shot at the Intercontinental Title. Roman back. Dean back. For his life to make sense again. To not feel like this all the goddamn day.

“I got it. I’m going to bed.”

“Why are you so stubborn?”

Dean is _right there_ again.

“Just… don’t.” Seth holds his hands up, slowly dragging his feet backwards. His fingertips catch the edge of the door, and begin to swing it shut. “If I trip over you sleeping outside my door in the morning, I will kill you.”

“Fuck you.”

Dean’s lip curls.

Seth shrugs. “Shoulda hit me in the back with a steel chair when I gave you the chance.”

And ain’t it the truth.

 

* * *

 

Two blankets, and the duvet. One blanket, half the duvet, just covering his legs. One foot sticking out from the duvet, his head seeking for the cool side of the pillow. It turns out that Dean, in any state, is more powerful than psychotropic drugs and sedatives. Disquieted, Seth tosses and turns until his stomach roils and he has to untangle himself from a knot of sheets and flannel, nearly tripping on his way to the en suite bathroom.

He slams the door behind him, hoping that three closed doors is enough to keep Dean from hearing his dry retching and coming crashing in.

Not much comes up, water and stomach acid and something foamy, and the process leaves Seth feeling wrung out and shrivelled.

Shaking his head, he closes his eyes, coughs, and spits.

_Water._

After a careful glass of room temperature water, Seth shuffles back to bed, rolling under every blanket on his bed, shivering. Shivering, shaking, he can’t quite decide. If he’s cold, or riding an awful come-down, or if Dean being in one of the next rooms is too much for his nerves to process at 3 AM.

He can’t sleep.

Sniffing, he reaches for his phone.

For the briefest of moments, he considers texting Roman. But no matter what he and Dean are going through with each other, he knows Roman should be left out of it. Roman has more important things going on.

But he misses him so much it feels like a constant blow.

Ignoring the swell of emotions in his chest, Seth opens his texts. He scrolls back, past well wishes and check ins and assurances, and finds the text chain from that night, from just two weeks before they lost Dean. Lost Dean, as if he wasn’t in just the next room, but _lost Dean_ in all the ways that matter, in all the soft, tender, delicate ways that will not stay fossilized, that will not stay quiet.

It was just a few months ago.

Time slips through fingers like water through a sieve.

Wed, 10/10/2018 

Seth 4:12 AM:  
i found him 

Ro 5:31 AM:  
you with deano?  
he okay?

Seth 5:33 AM:  
yes.  
no.

He’s still with Dean.

Dean’s not okay.

Seth thinks he might not be, either.

 

* * *

 

Here is a fact of the universe: Dean Ambrose will always come for Seth Rollins, as assuredly as Seth Rollins will always come for Dean Ambrose. In the morning, some short few hours later, Seth hears not the breaking of glass, or the slamming of his front door, or the start of a car engine. He hears the slight _click_ of a door knob opening and releasing, the whisper of the bottom of his bedroom door over the carpet. Light footsteps, towards him, glass and porcelain being placed on his nightstand. Then plastic, rattling with gel capsules. The chime of his phone being connected to its charger.

Two light kisses, Dean’s lips pressing to one eyelid, and then the other. The way he smells, like laundry soap and gasoline and leather. Then gone again.

Despite the ice pick ostensibly splitting his head, Seth cracks open his eyes. Dean, a shadow, the doorway. Again, and always.

Not a threat.

Not taunting.

Just going.

“You’re leaving.”

“I gotta go,” he says, distant, looking like a man who has remembered how to feel something more than rage, hold something in his hands more than destruction. But fear is not a soft emotion, fear is cold and stinging and paralyzing, up until right before it topples back over into anger. Dean doesn’t look at him, just stands in the weak grey light of morning as if he was born in it. “We’ll talk about… we’ll talk.”

“We’re not gonna talk.” Shivering, shaking, trembling, Seth sits up amongst his sheets and blankets.

Dean lifts his head, eyes so impossibly blue where they’re trapped in the half-sun.

“Right now you feel guilty. In a couple of days you'll be pissed at me again, and we'll go back to that for months, maybe a year. Then, after that, who knows.” Seth swallows hard around a sore throat and swollen tongue. “But we're not gonna talk.”

They barely say _I’m sorry_ and they don’t say _I forgive you._ They never spoke about turning their backs on each other, or when they choose to come back. They don’t talk about how they save each other, every time, until they choose not to. They don’t talk. They just do.

Their relationship is a mess of verbs.

Fight. Fuck. Save. Unite. Love. Hate. Kiss. Punch.

“How do you know that?” Dean asks, hands resting open at his sides.

“We’re not friends.”

“What are we?” he asks, looking at the bed as if he’s considering sitting on it, then reconsidering.

“I don’t know,” Seth replies, honest and raw. The last few months have him worn. There will be many more months to come. “But I can’t wait until we’re fighting by each other’s sides again.”

It would all be so much easier, if there was a line. A line that, if they crossed it, they could never come back. Something that said they had hurt each other enough, and it was over, but it doesn’t exist with them.

It never has. Not after their first match in FCW.  

Not now.

“I can’t make you any promises when that’ll be.”

“Then I’ll take what’s second best.”

They can almost smile.

“Stay alive, Rollins. You’re mine,” Dean says, tender and violent.

Seth starts thinking in verbs.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading - comments and kudos are always appreciated.


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